Page 20 of The Savage Queen

“Every time.”

Lir considered her, his dark lashes beading with moisture from the cloudburst around them.

“Real,” he said, his voice warming her abdomen.

“So, you’ve magicked your way into my mind.”

Lir smirked. “It’s not I who’s magicked their way into someone’s mind.”

“Then who?”

Lir’s expression grew more satisfied.

“I searched for a way to you. Any way I could touch you, feel you, be near you,” he said. “And had you not wanted the same, I never could’ve stepped into your dreams the way I have.”

Aisling ignored the silver-eyed ravens taking flight inside her abdomen. The heat creeping beneath her cheeks.

“You’re capable of a great many things, Aisling. In time, you’ll cast spells, enchantments, wield thedraiochtto the cusp of your own limits.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I think you do.”

“You think you know everything.”

He smiled at that, a razor-sharp grin that tilted the earth.

“I know what I want,” he replied, angling his head down to meet her eyes. They spoke a pace away from one another, shielded by the arms of the willow but steeped in the storm all the same.

“And what if you can’t have it?”

Slowly, Lir closed the distance between them till they stood but a breath’s width away. As with every time, as though he yearned for her touch as she did his. Against her own volition, craved it. The smell of him, the taste of his proximity, tightening the cord between them and pulling till Aisling believed she might surrender what self-control she still hoarded.

“A lesson you’ll learn in our eternity together,ellwyn, is that I always get what I want.”

Aisling held her breath.

“Ellwyn?”

Lir opened his mouth to reply but was interrupted by a noise. An image perhaps? Aisling wasn’t certain. Only that it caught his eye. Something shifting in the periphery.

Aisling followed his line of sight but saw nothing, the beat of her heart racing alongside his own. His eyes widened with a strange sort of panic Aisling had only ever seen when the fae king believed himself outside control.

“Wake up,” he said, his voice rougher now, laced with urgency. “Wake up, Aisling.”

Aisling staggered back as he reached out for her. Never had they touched before. Always, just before their bodies met, Aisling was snapped back into reality. Until now.

Lir caught her wrist, the sensation of his skin atop her own, burning where they touched.

Their gaze connected, Lir both equally perplexed and shocked, eyes large and questioning. But it was too late. Aisling was already spiraling back, falling upwards, and out of her dreams.

Aisling woke to a sword at her throat.

An impossibly large man dressed in blood-matted furs stood above her. He was perhaps a decade younger than her father. Dark stains streaked across his face, smeared by sweat, dirt, and snowstorms. A torch in one hand and his blade in the other. The stench of his iron was thick and putrid.

Aisling paled, her tongue turning to ash in her mouth.

The man brought a finger to his lips.

---